


She Is Coming...

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Category: Owl Service - Alan Garner
Genre: Alternate Character Interpretation, Bechdel Test Pass, F/M, Gen, Language of Flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2013-09-20
Packaged: 2017-12-27 04:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/974173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through the events of <i>The Owl Service</i>, what on earth was Alison's mother doing?  And why?</p><p>There's a skill to arranging flowers...</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Is Coming...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lejays17](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lejays17/gifts).



Margaret peered through her binoculars, her mouth thinning.  There her daughter was, up on the old peat road, talking with The Boy.  She put them down and sighed, reached for the cut flowers lying on an old towel waiting to be placed into their final arrangement, their place in the world.

She was still arranging them when Alison came in, flushed and smiling.  “Well?” Margaret asked.  “Are you happy?”

“Of course I am,” the girl snapped.

“Do you think you’ll still be happy when your friends stop inviting you to things?  When it’s you that gets whispered about?”

“I’m not a Birmingham Belle, Mother.”

“I should hope not.”  She inserted a rose into her composition and considered it critically.  “And are you a member of the choir still?  Or the Club?”  Alison bristled behind her, her reflection dim in the glass.  “It would be noticed, is what I’m saying.”

“It wouldn’t _be_ like that.”

There, the arrangement was done at last.  “It would.”

The girl’s face crumpled, and she left the room in a rush.  Margaret sat in a window seat and gazed regretfully out through the glass.  It was too soon, she knew, to tell her daughter that marriage was out of the question, but that someday a discreet affair might not be.  That a grubby Welsh boy fresh out of the Valley was not good enough, but yet might aspire; that the whiff of coal could be washed clean in service – in an army record, or a University career. 

She told herself that any attachment that could be dissolved with so small a thing as a threat to choir practice or the tennis club could not be as great as all that, not really.  She tried to believe it.

***

In her bedroom, late at night, Clive was telling her about the latest tantrum.  “I say, old thing, couldn’t you have a word with her?  Women’s work to run the household, all that?”  She looked at him dourly, the brave fighter pilot who quailed at the sight of an angry servant, and she tried not to laugh at him.

“No, keep her on, she belongs to this house as much as I do.”

When she’d first come to this place, as a new bride, her husband had been full of stories about it.  How the peat had been brought down from the ridges, and the rain could seal the valley in a summer storm, the weight of the slate that built up around the sides.  She could feel it, even then, the deep currents thrumming through the living things and the river and the shape of the mountains – the anger and hate and despair.  He’d told her about his cousin Bertram, who had loved so indiscreetly that his family had been secretly relieved when he’d had the motorbike accident.  She’d thought then about the young maid, Nancy, who’d wanted so hard to go up in the world and been packed off to a factory town instead, and she’d _pitied_ her.

***

In the fields, walking with her daughter, she found feathers – cream and white and brown, the long wing feathers of an owl.  She picked them up and stroked them gently.  She was here, alright.  She directed her daughter’s attention away, pointed at the flowers they were walking through as the girl took more snaps.

“There’s broom for you – humility and neatness.  And meadowsweet.  They say it means uselessness, but I like to think of it more as considered non-action.  Sit tight and let the currents of the world pass through you.”

“Mother.  Would you tell me about Cousin Bertram?”

“Bertram?”  She thought about it.  “I only met him once.  He came to our wedding.”  There were pieces of the man she’d been able to put together after the fact, though, little fragments of things not quite said by his relatives.  A cocky young man: aware of, and pleased by, his privileges.  A man who would be unfaithful at his core – easy to get, but hard to keep.  “He was a proud young gentleman, your father used to say.  Good with his hands – always tinkering about with his motorcycle, fiddling with dead things.  He liked to hunt, you know, and then he’d stuff what he killed and put it in the billiard room.” 

“Oh,” Alison said, and raised a camera to take a photo of her mother.

“You know,” Margaret said, “I was thinking.  Next summer, would you like to visit Italy?  Venice I’m thinking of – the canals are beautiful there…”

“And then what?  I stay at home and arrange flowers for you?”  The girl fumbled with her camera, winding the film.

“There’s an art to arranging flowers.  Anyone can do what they like with something dead – but to shape living things…  That takes real skill.”

“If you say so,” Alison grumbled.  She lifted the camera and took a photo blindly, aimed seemingly at random at the Stone of Gronw, a stone pierced in its side by rage and spite and hatred.

Margaret looked up at the figure brooding in the trees on the other side of the field and frowned.

“Oh, it’s only Gwyn,” Alison said.

***

From the kitchen, she could hear the sounds of yelling, and the beating of a poker ( _owl wings_ ) against empty air.  As she watched out the window, she saw their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s boy hustling out the door into the rain, heavy bags dragged behind them.  Young Nancy ( _old Nancy_ ) had lost.  The girl who had tried to have it both ways so many years ago ( _the sturdy Welshman/the young Master_ ) and failed at both, had given in to spite, had lost the right to choose once again.  Yes, Margaret had always pitied the woman, but it had been tempered ( _always_ ) by professional disdain – the long ago lessons of her mother and grandmother ran through her mind: keep a lock on the door, place a seal on your heart.  Rage was for them as had nothing to lose.

Out in the yard, she went to check on the sealed up room.  The lock was finally broken, the old motorbike revealed to the world, the dead owl battered to pieces.  She picked up the label: _Bubo bubo bubo_ , and shuddered.  The Latin name of the Eagle Owl always made her think of the Black Death.  Oh, you _men_ , she thought.  Always thinking you could seal up the wildness in _things_ : stuffed owls and plates and paintings; tried to hide it away, left it waiting for the next time the living things that formed the pattern moved the right way, _thought_ the right way, opened a crack that it could break out into.  If you wanted to contain something so powerful, she knew, you needed to work inside the pattern, live it yourself, guide it through your own body.

She shrugged into her anorak and went out into the meadows – the storm had crushed much of the plant life in the valley, but with thought and care she was able to find the things she needed.  She came back into the yard hours later, her arms filled with golden broom and the creamy down of meadowsweet, took it up to her work room.  It was too late in the season for catkins, the flowers of the oak, but she had some acorns with her for fruitfulness: for bravery and hospitality and independence.  If you were going to put a face on a thing, it should be one that you admired… 

From the window, she could see Huw Hannerhob staggering into the kitchen carrying Alison, her golden haired, high stepping daughter.  Alison, who carried the blood on both sides of her soul, who looked pale as death.  She left the men of the valley to it, and turned to her own work – cleaned a vase and placed it at her table ready to be refilled, a wealth of meadowsweet and broom and oak leaves lying before her to be moulded into a thing of beauty.  She picked up the first blossom and carefully trimmed it.

Blodeuwedd always wanted to be flowers, really.

**Author's Note:**

> I find Alison’s mother to be a really interesting character _in absentia_ in this book. She keeps on being talked about, usually when she’s causing trouble or making a fuss, but she never appears, never has dialogue for herself – we only get to know her as shaped and perceived by other people. In her own way, she’s caught just as much by other people’s desires as Blodeuwedd, she just has a less destructive way of dealing with it. (I’m still not sure if I like her, but sometimes there are reasons for someone being unlikeable.)
> 
> “There’s broom for you – humility and neatness. And meadowsweet.” - Using the Jean Marsh/Kate Greenaway version of the Language of Flowers.
> 
> "the flowers of the oak, but she had some acorns with her for fruitfulness: for bravery and hospitality and independence." - also from the Language of Flowers, a multi-parter - Oak Leaves are for bravery, an Oak Tree is hospitality, and White Oak is independence.
> 
> The original Blodeuwedd was created from broom, meadowsweet and oak flowers. Her name literally means 'flower face'. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blodeuwedd>


End file.
